A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with - Early Modern Texts

The Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 4: The degradation of woman
[Admitting that she is repeating herself, MW says that
how a person thinks affects his or her character. Her present
topic has been one special case of this general truth, namely
the harm that women do to themselves by spending so
much time thinking about ‘their persons’, e.g. what sort
of effect they will have when they next appear in public.]
Women of quality [MW’s phrase] seldom do any of the actual
dress-making: all they exercise is their taste. And because
they think less about the finery, when the business of their
toilet is over they can ·put it behind them and· be at ease in
a way that is usually not open to women who dress merely
for the sake of dressing. In fact, the observation that the
middle rank ·of society· is the one in which talents thrive
best doesn’t apply to women. [If MW means her own observation
on page 39, then she isn’t quite accurate. What she referred to back
there was the well-known fact that ‘the middle rank contains most virtue
and abilities’.] Women of the superior class do at least pick
up a smattering of literature, and they converse more with
men on general topics, so they acquire more knowledge
than the women who ape their fashions and faults without
sharing their advantages. As for virtue (using the word in
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a comprehensive sense): I have seen most virtue in low life.
Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of
their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the
fathers would have scattered; but gentlewomen are too lazy
to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined
by civilization. Indeed the good sense I have met with among
poor women who have had few advantages of education yet
have acted heroically has strongly confirmed my opinion that
trivial activities have made women trivial. . . .
In tracing the causes that I think have degraded woman,
I have confined myself to ones that universally act on the
morals and manners of the whole sex; and it seems clear
to me that they all arise from lack of understanding. Does
this weakness of the faculties arise from physical or from
accidental causes? [That is: is it causally determined by the constitutions
of women as such, or is it caused by their circumstances?] Time
alone can tell. I shan’t lay any great stress on the example of
a few women 7 who were given a masculine education from
which they acquired courage and resolution; I only contend
that men who have been placed in similar situations have
acquired a similar character. . . .
Sappho, Héloise, Catherine Macaulay, Catherine the Great of Russia, Madame d’Eon, etc. These and many more can be counted as ‘exceptions’; and
aren’t all heroes and heroines exceptions to general rules? I want to see women neither as heroines nor as lower animals, but as reasonable creatures.
[Catherine Macaulay was a contemporary of MW’s, a much respected thinker and writer; Madame d’Eon was in fact a man who passed as a woman
through most of his life.]
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